“I wanted to ask if that was all right,” the constable said, still not looking at me. “He lives very near here, down in the forest, and the king thought he would love coming up to the castle for Christmas, rather than spending it alone, that is, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course I won’t mind.”
The constable looked up then, smiling. “I’m sorry to bother you, then, but one hears rumors of how young and old royal wizards are always at odds, and even though I’d hinted to you when you first came that you might visit him, I knew you hadn’t, so though I’d hoped that in your case …”
I interrupted before he could make his statement any more involved. “Actually, I have visited him two or three times. We’ve probably become as good friends as old and young wizards ever do.”
The constable was positively beaming now. “Well! That’s very good news. I hadn’t wanted to pry into what you’d done, knowing that a wizard needs his privacy, but I’m delighted to hear that! Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He was whistling as he took down an account book while I went back out.
I paused in the center of the courtyard, trying to think whom I should suspect next of having a den of evil magic in the cellar, since it was so difficult to suspect the constable. The constable’s wife, the cook, the stable boy, and the kitchen maid, the only other people who had been in the castle when we arrived to find it dark, seemed even less viable alternatives. I briefly considered but rejected the possibility that Dominic had put everyone to sleep from far away. I didn’t know of any spell that would do such a thing from a distance, and could think of no reason why he would want to do so. Besides, I always kept coming back to the fact that Dominic was the one who had first warned me against the evil spell on the castle.
I shivered and was starting back toward my chambers when I was startled by seeing a tall, thin form standing motionless just inside the castle gates. “Joachim’s back already,” I thought in surprise. Then the man turned to look at me and I saw it was not the chaplain. It was someone I had never seen before.
He did not in fact look like Joachim at all, except that he too had enormous black eyes, in a face that was almost inhuman in its pallor and expressionlessness. He stared at me without blinking.
“Excuse me,” I said, “can I help you? Have you just arrived?” For a moment I thought it might be a new member of the castle staff, signed on by the constable while the royal party was away, and arriving to take up his duties this morning.
But the stranger turned away again without speaking and, with long strides, started toward the south tower.
I went after him, but he had a large lead, and he disappeared around the tower’s base. When I came up, there was no sign of him.
This, I thought, was very odd. There were several doors he could have gone into, so his disappearance was not very mysterious, but no stranger coming to a castle should flee before the royal wizard.
III
I went back to the constable’s chambers and knocked. He was working on the accounts as his wife finished her mopping. Both looked surprised to see me again so soon.
“Did you hire a new member of the staff while we were gone?” I asked. “There’s a stranger here, someone I’ve never seen before, and when I tried to talk to him he went across the courtyard and into a doorway.”
“I certainly haven’t hired anyone new,” said the constable. “It must be a visitor. But I don’t know why he wouldn’t talk to you.”
I had been concentrating so much on fears of black magic that I realized I had been overlooking something obvious: a thief sneaking into the castle. “Do you think it could be someone trying to steal something?”
“Let’s hope not,” said the constable, putting his account book back and jumping up. “We’d better find him.”
We checked the doors leading off the corner of the courtyard behind the south tower. These were rooms that were rarely used, and only one of the doors was unlocked. The constable opened the others with his bunch of keys, to make sure the thief had not gone in and looked the door behind him, but all the rooms were empty.
“I’ll get Dominic,” I said. “He should be able to help us.”
While the constable headed toward the main store rooms to see if they had been disturbed, I located Dominic in the great hall, talking to the king and queen. “Can you help the constable and me?” I asked. “I’ve just seen a stranger in the courtyard, and we’re worried it might be a thief. He ran away when I spoke to him.”
There were advantages of having someone large and burly beside you when looking for someone who might be dangerous. Dominic came at once, but I felt uneasy as I saw the queen putting on her shawl with a smile of excitement. I knew she loved hunting, but I didn’t think she should be hunting this person.
Nevertheless, she came with us. We met the constable in the middle of the courtyard. “I haven’t seen any sign of break-in or tampering with the locks,” said the constable. “Maybe the wizard frightened him off.”
“There he is!” I said. At the far end of the courtyard, near the kitchens, the tall thin form appeared for a moment and then disappeared again into a doorway. We all ran that direction, but when we arrived he again was gone.
“He can’t have gone far,” said Dominic. “We’ll have him in a minute.”
But he was wrong. All morning we pursued the stranger, and all morning he eluded us. Sometimes we thought he was gone and sat down to rest, only to see him again, striding across the far end of the courtyard, or standing on the parapet far above us, or looking out a window with his enormous black eyes. Dominic recruited the rest of the knights, and as the servants came back to the castle some of them as well joined in the pursuit.
I was glad the others saw him too, or I would have begun to worry that I was losing my mind.
“Are you sure you aren’t playing one of your tricks on us, Wizard?” a knight asked in one of the pauses in which we thought we had lost him. We were sitting in a row on a bench in the courtyard, panting in spite of the cold air. The queen was the only one who still looked eager for the chase.
“I’m certainly not responsible,” I said. “And I don’t think there are any other wizards near here who might try something like this.” But I did consider the possibility that this person might only be an illusion.
A few minutes later, the queen spotted a dark head peering down at us from the parapet. I probed quickly with my mind to see if this person was indeed real, furious at whoever might have pulled such a trick.
A wizard can normally only meet directly the mind and thoughts of another wizard, one who is willing for such contact, even though the Lady Maria had once been able to hear my thoughts. But one should still be able to find and recognize another mind, to tell at least if it is the mind of a man or a woman, reality or illusion.
I found the stranger’s mind and almost fell over backwards with the impact. This was no illusion. The man’s mind was looking for my own, ready to meet it, and his was totally evil. The distant, oblique touch of evil I had been feeling for months was no longer distant; it was here.
The rest ran after him, but I broke my mind away from that contact and sank back on the bench. Where had he come from? Why had he appeared in the castle now? What did he want with us?
I heard a step immediately next to me and whirled around. But it was not the stranger, only Gwen and Jon, coming toward me hand-in-hand.
“We wanted to tell you first, sir,” said Gwen. “We’ve gotten engaged!”
It took me several moments to recover my composure enough to be able to say, “Congratulations!” without fearing it would sound like the gaspings of a fish. I decided it would be tasteless to ask if Jon had resorted to the long-threatened love potion or if he had won her with his own unaided charms; I assumed the latter.
“I know you may be a little surprised, after a few things I’d said,” said Gwen with a smile up at Jon. “But when all of you left for the duchess’s castle, Jon asked if I wanted to spend my vacation with him, visiting his mother, and I said I would. We worked everything out pretty quickly, then! Now, we’ll have to tell the constable and get his permission to stay on once we’re married. We’ll want the chaplain to marry us in the castle chapel, of course.”
“Of course,” I said inanely.
“I just wanted to say something,” Jon interjected. “A couple of times, sir, I was jealous of your attentions toward Gwen. I know it sounds silly, and I’m really embarrassed about it now, so I just wanted to apologize.”
“That’s quite all right,” I said, feeling even more inane and watching the courtyard beyond them for a tall
